


take arms against a sea of troubles

by usingmyoxygen (keithsforeheadtattoo)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Cancer, Community: inception_kink, Leukemia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-11
Updated: 2011-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 19:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 8,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithsforeheadtattoo/pseuds/usingmyoxygen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I need to tell you something," you say, and he says, "All right, shoot," while chewing.</p><p>"I have cancer," you say, and put your sandwich down.</p><p>You don't know what you'd expected him to do but when he just stares for a moment and then feels in his pocket for his totem, it startles you into something that feels like heartbreak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

You don't know what you expected yourself to do, but it's a little numbing when all that comes out is a plain "okay". You listen more than you talk until there's a silence where you know he's expecting some form of reaction. You look at the walls for a moment and wonder how many people have cried in here. You shift in your seat and wonder how many people have sat right where you are and gotten the same news. You say "okay" and he tells you some dates and writes down some things on his clipboard and you drive home feeling smothered and empty, like everything inside you has come out and blanketed you instead; forced you down.

You sit in your apartment with the lights off and stare at the Food Network for a couple hours before falling asleep on the couch.

\- - - -

Dom is the first one you tell because you're afraid to tell your mother and your sister just got engaged yesterday and you're not about to stomp on that. He asks if there's anything he can do, and for a moment you regret ever opening your mouth if it's only come off as some helpless plea. He reads the look in your eyes and says, "no, I mean... that's not what I meant, I'm just. I'll be here."

He will be here. They will all be here, you think, to watch dark circles bloom under your eyes and sharp blue veins crop up along your whitening skin. They will be here to watch you have to buy slimmer clothes and bruise like a peach and recede into yourself. You wonder if you'll come to terms with it, or if you'll die, or if the two will engage in some worrying, time-starved race.

Outside, Mal is trying to scoop a fiercely resistant James out of the sandbox. You smile, watching.

"Okay," you say to Dom, because the word has served you well enough in the past.

He gives you a look but says nothing. Maybe that's the upside, you think. Nobody can argue with you now. Nobody will dare. In the coming months, it's this absence of conflict that will bring you to your boiling point, but now as you sit in the Cobbs' kitchen and wait for Mal to come inside, you assure yourself that there will never come a day when Dom's stiff, disapproving gestures are anything you yearn for.

\- - - -

So many of your days now are spent at home. You watch a lot of made-for-TV movies and read a lot of Highsmith and eat a lot of mac and cheese. You wind up on Wikipedia one day and before you can tell yourself not to, you're already typing.

About halfway down the page, there's a picture of an outline of a man, opaque and filled with stark, colored organs. There are indicating lines all across his body listing symptoms and where they manifest themselves. "Weakness", it says, under "muscular". All the other terms are specific, bordering on clinical, and then there is "weakness" which makes you scroll past the silhouette man back into the text.

Then there is "typical treatment approach" -- "CLL is probably incurable by present treatments," it says, which makes you want to close the window and crawl into bed and fall asleep forever. Instead you read the rest of the page, and then seek out another and another, taking in everything you were afraid to ask after your diagnosis.

 _Doctors do not know what causes the cell-change that leads to CLL._ it says on a particularly blunt site, all white background and bulky black font. _There is no way to prevent CLL. You can't catch CLL from someone else._

 _CLL has generally not been associated with any environmental or external factors._

You shut your laptop soon after this and get in bed at five-thirty, but you don't sleep until close to ten.


	2. two

"Jesus, Arthur," he says when you tell him. You are in a deli, one close to your flat, and it strikes you now why it feels so strange. It shouldn't be here. You should be in some Corsican bistro or Belgian coffeehouse or Parisian cafe because that's what the pair of you do. You and Eames were made to run around the world and only ever break important news to each other over coffee and cigarettes and through ominous manila folders. Instead you are eating a sandwich and he has a pungently vinegar-heavy pasta salad and you are in a small, half-empty deli thirty minutes outside of Chicago.

"I need to tell you something," you say, and he says, "All right, shoot," while chewing.

"I have cancer," you say, and put your sandwich down.

You don't know what you'd expected him to do but when he just stares for a moment and then feels in his pocket for his totem, it startles you into something that feels like heartbreak.

\- - - -

You see Eames a lot more after this.

You attempt to blow the whole matter off with jokes: "If I'd known all I had to do for you to call me was get cancer, I'd have done it a lot sooner," you say when he rings you up asking only what size chai latte you want because he knows you'd never turn one down.

"Don't say that," is the response from the other line, in a voice so plaintive that somehow you are the one who feels guilty. So you don't say things like that anymore, just quietly appreciate the new routine of morning coffee and a new flavor of bagel each time.

Out of all the responses you've gotten, Eames's is the one that shocks you the most. You've always known he cares about you but this is a brand that hasn't dared to rear its head since last year's Edelman job. It hadn't been the first time you'd slept with him but the following demeanor and expensive breakfast and singular attempt at a public display of affection had been new and such a contrast to regular Eames that in attempting to process everything, you'd unintentionally -- and, you'd thought, irrevocably -- shut him down. But then there is this third Eames, who is only half-playful because he is mostly-afraid but still brings baked goods in the morning and is always willing to offer up commentary during sessions of your DVRed episodes of Project Runway.

The part of you that had been initially offended at this attention has rapidly been quenched. You don't care why he's seeing you anymore so long as he's seeing you.

\- - - -

You start treatment.

You sit in the waiting room afterward and let your eyes lose focus over the gaudy colors of a spread of magazines on the coffee table. It takes more effort than you'd expected to get out your phone and dial Eames's number and you sink into your chair once you're done, phone pressed between your ear and shoulder.

"I fucking _walked here_ ," is the first thing you manage to grind out through your blinding anger at yourself, and before you can ask for a ride he's asking you for the clinic's address.

The drive back to your place is short but you fall asleep on the way there and wake up in the morning in your own bed, still in your clothes, with Eames on your couch snoring against the background of an idly playing episode of Jerry Springer. There's a fresh pot of coffee sitting on your counter and some foreign feeling sitting in your heart.


	3. three

As the time you spend alone becomes rarer, it also becomes stranger. You've learned and relearned the things Eames likes to listen to and eat and watch because they are always changing. You've begun to kick habits that you'd previously let run of their own accord on the assumption that they might worry him. It's strange to be alone now because it reminds you of whatever terminal case of dependency you've let yourself sink into.

You had set out from the beginning to never let this get the better of your dignity.

It's a Saturday at 10 AM when you are, for the first time, glad you have only one apartment key, in your own pocket of your own pants. You lay face-first on your bed and listen to him knock once, then again, then call you, then knock. Maybe he thinks you could've died already. The thought hurts you in a way you hadn't accounted for, so you laugh instead. You let yourself fall asleep to the sound of your half-muted ringtone and when you wake up you play his message on your answering machine.

 _I'm outside, Arthur, and I, uh. I brought..._

This is all it says.  
You play it a few more times before you give yourself over to sleep again. It never once crosses your mind that maybe it's not just your life he's concerned for but also your happiness.

\- - - -

There is only a week in between.

You wind up with five messages, the first two of which you replay multiple times and the final three which you never bother to check because you've already dialed the number.

You could use the human contact, you figure. If that came with a slight dependency, so be it. If it came with bagels, all the better.

\- - - -

When you go to Dom and Mal's again, you are happily surprised to find that not much has changed. You come over early enough to see the kids but late enough that they're ready for bed a few card games into the night. Once they're asleep, the three of you talk for hours and drink enough wine that you have to call a cab to take you home at one-thirty in the morning. There is only one moment that's different, and that is the unaddressed look in Mal's eyes when she offers you their guest room for the night, and that is the reason you take a cab home. You're not offended, or even angry, just afraid. In that moment, you had seen her need for resolution and hadn't wanted to talk about it because what resolution could you give her anyway? You couldn't. She knew that just as well as you, and yet you still didn't want to let her down.


	4. four

Takeaway breakfast at your apartment has been the routine for a while, so when Eames calls you up to make post-chemo dinner plans, you're surprised and even excited in the most discreet of ways.

Average-ish Chinese serves as the happy medium between his eagerness to pay for a real dinner and your hankering for something greasy and quick. Eames tells you boatloads of stories about the job he's working on and the team he's working with and the disaster that is their newly-initiated point woman. His every word makes you ache for work and yet no part of you is sad or jealous. You miss it like you would miss childhood -- fondly and even painfully, but not in the way you would miss something tangible. You can see from his expression that he realizes you're hurting over it and yet it's still you that is egging him on, inquiring after more stories until he has run out of things to say and you still feel hollow and closed off.

You don't eat a lot; nonetheless your appetizer-plate of chow mein manages to force its way back up before you've left. You had tried hard to prevent bullshit like this, you think, Eames's footsteps heavy and quick on the concrete behind you.

"Arthur?"

He reaches you in time to witness you emptying the rest of your stomach along the curb.

"Don't," you call out preemptively before he's made a move. He understands and gives you your space as you clean yourself up as best you can and slowly stand.

"Seeing as I think I've already ended the evening early, I'd like to go home."

You don't look at him. He hands you his car keys and you climb into the passenger seat as he goes to pay and leave a hefty tip. He has known you long enough that he can distinguish your subtle moods. Your speech always becomes more formal when you're angry.

You had honestly tried to not let this happen but it did, and does again with you heaving out the car window en route to your apartment. You have never felt more disgusting.

"Goodnight," you say when he stops at your building.

"You don't need any company?"

You can't even bring yourself to lie, so you just smile and wave him off before heading upstairs. You hadn't meant to give some false start, to close yourself off and then come back only to leave again after two weeks, but then you hadn't meant to talk about work or throw up in the parking lot or get cancer in the first place.

\- - - -

The next morning the Food Network is on again where you'd forgotten about it and left it playing. They're making something with Chinese noodles in it.

After two and a half months of unemployment, heavy chemotherapy and late stage leukemia, this is what makes you cry.


	5. five

You try to cut yourself off again but you can't. Even the week and three days you manage is hard by itself. You leave your phone unattended in a drawer and don't take calls from anyone, but after nine days have passed you face a moment of weakness and wind up furiously scrolling through answering machine messages. There are twenty-three total, from Dom and Mal and your sister and your dad, but mostly, as you'd predicted, from Eames.

You only listen to one before you've made up your mind:  
 _Hey, uh. It's me. I know by now you don't check these, or.... or you don't answer. Uh. I know you're not looking for, um... emotional charity, or... sappy bullshit... but I just, uh. I just wanted to say I care about you. Regardless of... condition. I mean... I don't know what I mean, that sounds shitty, don't listen to this one. If you're listening to this one, stop it, I've left better. I left a better one on, I think... Tuesday? Tuesday. Listen to the one from Tuesday, it's far better worded._

You conclude that it must be the chemo wearing you down. It's the only possible explanation for why you're smiling and your eyes are watering and you can't help but let Eames in whenever he so much as suggests any interest.

\- - - -

He kisses you for the first time since Edelman.

He walks in, sets everything down on the counter and asks if it would be too forward if he kissed you.

"Um. Oh. No, that's fine," you say, and you hadn't meant to understate it so badly but he's awfully talented at catching you off-guard. Your hair is mussed from sleeping and you're wearing the same pajamas you've had on for two days, so it's his loss, anyway.

"Missed you," he murmurs against your ear before moving his mouth to your neck. Your breath hitches in your throat; he is still familiar with the places you like to be touched.

"'S'only been ten days," you remind him, but you have a feeling you know what he really means. You've seen each other countless times afterward, but since the Edelman job, he's missed you.

\- - - -

For a while after this, things don't change. You don't let them. Part of you sees Mal in everyone now, that look she'd given you; the desperate search that you know in yourself and have seen congeal behind the eyes of everyone you notify.

You have always been reclusive to a degree when it comes to your personal life, and you wonder often if you've just let the cancer become an all-encompassing excuse.

Nothing gets worse, but nothing gets better, and this time, he doesn't come after you.

You become proactive and call him up for dinner instead. "Chinese food," you insist on principle. "And I'll pay."

\- - - -

All you can hear is his breath, uneven and surging against you.

"Sorry," he says, "God, uh, sorry -- I'll --"

"Okay, it's okay," you breathe, shaking your head. He rolls off of you. "I just... I just had treatment... They, um, said this might. Uh."

This is not at all the sort of issue you had expected to come up. Everything under the sun but this. So you laugh, and it's not even bitter, it just actually, genuinely strikes you as funny that now, the first time in seven months that you've gotten laid, when things are finally going just the way you want them, is when you can't get hard for more than about twenty seconds.

"It's okay, I'm serious. I'm the one who should be saying sorry for blueballing you."

"Been blueballing me for over a year now," says Eames. "I figure I can stand a while longer."

\- - - -

Eames is gone in the morning, but he returns in an hour with bagels. You realize you have finally struck a comfortable balance.


	6. six

A lot of things get better.

A lot of things get worse.

There are a lot of days where you can't stop smiling. There are a lot of days when you can't keep food down. There are a lot of days when you can't imagine living another second like this, and there are others where you can no longer relate to how life was when it wasn't like this.

A lot of things get harder.

A lot of things get easier.

There is not a single day when you shut Eames out anymore, and finally, every part of you is okay with this.

\- - - -

The next time you go to Dom and Mal's, you get there an hour earlier than you had before. You play hopscotch with Phillipa and when she and James need a monster or an alien or a giant evil robot king for their avid games of pretend, you eagerly provide. After the kids are in bed, you and Dom and Mal go for a long walk around the lake by their house until you're out of breath and sore. The three of you sit together on a park bench and talk about movies until you're recuperated. When you're all back home, you talk about movies again and then you watch movies and get drunk as is tradition. You spend the night in the Cobbs' guest room and wake up to the smell of apple pancakes made from scratch.

\- - - -

The day Eames asks you to move in with him is the day you wake up and you can't stand.

You spend most of the day at his house.

"Stay with me," he says, and when you laugh and say "I am," he says, "No, I mean... permanently."

You are wiped out after treatment, as usual, and so you go back to your own apartment to take a nap before calling Eames. When you wake up it's dark out, everything sounds like it's underwater and when you try to stand you take two steps before you've stumbled and you're on the ground before you can process what's wrong with you. You're too disjointed and weak to do anything but lay where you've fallen. You cover your face with your hands only to find they're shaking. This won't happen anymore, you think, letting one long breath out in halting intervals. You're going to move somewhere with no rent and no shitty upstairs neighbors and it's going to be a real house with another person in it and this won't happen anymore.

\- - - -

"What happened?" he keeps asking you, but you have no real answer, so you say "Let's go home."

You pack up all your favorite clothes and a few boxes of uncooked pasta and your laptop and the only time you go to your apartment from that point forward is when you, Eames and Dom are moving out all the furniture.


	7. seven

Six days after they switch you off IVs and onto pills, your hair starts coming out in fistfuls. You had sort of expected this from the moment you knew you were going to be in chemo, but the suddenness of it is what strikes you. You respond with equal speed: the morning after the first alopecic signs, you shower, examine the dark wad of hair collected in the drain, dry yourself off, and shave your head bald.

"Well." Eames says, taken aback but smiling, when he gets home and sees you.

"I look like Telly Savalas," you say morosely, and then you both crack up laughing.

Eames looks you over for a moment. "Much more Andre Agassi, I'm thinking." You go to make tea and Eames follows you into the kitchen, hoisting himself up onto the counter. "Or Bruce Willis."

He comes up behind you and smoothes his hands over your head like a crystal ball.

"...or Britney Spears," he says, already giggling to himself, and you chuck a teabag at his head.

\- - - -

The new medication isn't all bad, you begin to discover.

"Hey," you growl in Eames's ear; he stirs, and when he's awake enough to process the situation, seems happily surprised to find you straddling him.

"You're not too worn out?" he asks hopefully.

"I think it's since I switched to pills," you explain. "There's been some upsides. ...So to speak."

\- - - -

Christmas rolls around in such a way that it catches you completely off-guard. It's not that you thought you'd be dead by this point, and yet somehow you've forgotten to account for this part of your life altogether. Maybe you'd figured that after the diagnosis, you would let the rest of your days melt together into a wad of leftovers and Dancing with the Stars and lying aimlessly under the covers for hours.

You and Eames go Christmas shopping on December 23rd and make a mutual pact to buy ridiculous sweaters for everyone you don't like but are required to buy things for.

He picks out gifts for an abundance of siblings, a myriad of Eameses he promises you'll get to meet. He tries to get you into a photo booth with him but you refuse. He makes up for it by always having the camera on his phone ready when you aren't. You pick out an atrocious reindeer-patterned sweater and he doesn't say a word when you tell him it's for your dad. He tacks an extra hour or so onto the trip getting sidetracked with trying on clothes until you finally ask, "Can your present to me this year please be that you don't buy any of these?" As consolation, you secretly purchase a weird scarf that he liked and stow it away in your bag. You both get coffees in the little Starbucks by the front of the mall and do the sort of sitting aimlessly for hours that you wouldn't mind letting the rest of your life turn into.

You are happy.

\- - - -

You sleep through Christmas morning and wake up at 2:30 in the afternoon. You and Eames exchange a few small gifts and have sex which takes longer than usual to execute (but ends up ultimately successful) before heading over to Dom and Mal's. One of your old forgers, Matheson, is there, and a few architects from the newer jobs who you meet for the first time at the party. One of them, Nash, has just wrapped his first ever job, under Dom's careful direction. He doesn't do much but play cards all night and he smells like musk and mothballs -- you want to not like him, but when you're helping Mal in the kitchen, she mentions something about Dom inviting Nash "because he had nowhere else to sleep", and try as you might, you can't hate him after that.

Mal's parents and sisters and nieces are all there. Only about three of them speak English, but the language barrier doesn't stop Phillipa from instantly befriending the little French girl closest to her in age and spending the rest of the night trying on dresses with her and doing makeovers with supplies stolen out of Mal's purse. Dom's mother is there and within thirty seconds of meeting her you're convinced she's the sweetest woman on earth. She's smiley and clean-smelling and soft-spoken and seems as though she could've walked out of a commercial for pancake mix. You don't know for sure, but you approximate that she's the only blood relative Dom knows.

Eames forgets that not everyone knows you're together and at some point after dinner, kisses you on the cheek and grabs for your hand. "Oh," he says when you remind him. "Well. Guess it's not much of a secret anymore, then," and laces his fingers with yours.

When you come to help clean up, Mal is sitting on the kitchen island looking at her hands. You ask her what's wrong but she just shakes her head and kneads the thumb of one hand repeatedly over the knuckles of the other.

"I'm fine," she tells you, but there are tears in her eyes and she won't talk to you one-on-one for the rest of the night.

The Cobblets and a few of the little French kids put on a talent show near the end of the evening. James and Phillipa sing part of _La Marseillaise_ and when she thinks nobody's watching her, Mal squints her eyes in focus and balls her hands into kneading, squirmy fists.

\- - - -

Since the Cobbs hosted Christmas, Eames insists that you two take on New Years. You know that, no matter what he promises, you'll wind up doing most of the set-up, but you agree anyway and ease yourself down the slippery slope of noisemakers and mimosas.

It's a lot smaller of an event than it would be at the Cobb household, but you can't say you're displeased. It's nice to have that change of pace, a holiday with just you, Eames, Dom, Mal, their kids, and Matheson. Eames produces a stash of board games from god-knows-where and this takes up at least half the evening. Dom and Eames both get drunk relatively early on in the night, and you catch up with Matheson over their warbling choruses of Auld Lang Syne. He's retired since Christmas, you learn, and is considering doing the unthinkable: going back to his former, actual, waking-world job. Law, of course, isn't the most exciting profession when compared to forging -- "but," he says, "I s'pose even on the worst of days it beats taking a bullet to the groin. Can't say I expect that to be a frequent occurrence in the real world."

When Phillipa falls asleep on the floor in front of the television at eight o'clock, Dom takes you aside and practically begs you to drive his kids home.

"What about Mal?" you ask, discreetly shifting your gaze towards her. She is nothing like she was at Christmas, instead all smiles and stimulating conversation.

Dom shrugs in a manner that suggests he's struggling to be flippant.

"She, um, I think she had... I think we both had too much to drink. I think she's... I really need you to take them, Arthur."

The urgency in his final eight words plugs up every response you'd had planned. You wait until Mal leaves for the bathroom and then scoop up Phillipa and take James by the hand, leading them to your car as fast as possible. It's almost ironic, in a strange sort of way, you think as you pull into the Cobbs' driveway to find their nanny's car parked ahead of you. Back when you were working jobs it was always Cobb that would do the driving while you explained.

When you get back, Eames, Mal and Matheson are all laughing and talking on the couch and Dom is in an armchair watching the broadcast of the countdown to midnight somewhere with a stark time difference. He and Mal head home an hour or so later; she drives.


	8. eight

The fever you'd chalked up to a seasonal bug sticks with you all the way through February. You don't want to bring it up because you don't want to bring yourself down. At this point, you'd almost rather leave everything unattended and get worse the natural way than treat every symptom like impending death and try to placate it with radiation.

You're still going to regular treatment, though, and taking your meds and doing everything expected of you. You're also still losing a lot of weight and sleeping a lot and throwing up almost every day. You wonder if maybe the two don't just balance each other out and no matter what you do you're always going to be on the brink of something awful.

Every time after treatment, Eames still buys you dinner. When you're too sleepy to bother with anything but sweatpants and mumbled responses, he'll take you home and order the pair of you a pizza and watch bad movies with you until you fall asleep resting against him.

\- - - -

The way she says it makes you hate her a little. "Keep". "Keep" like it's some fun and cutesy thing she's going to do with you.

You go in for treatment like you always do but there's more to it at the end. You'd slept all day with a fierce determination that you would be awake enough to sit through whatever piece of avant garde community theatre Eames had bought tickets to and you're eager to get the show over with before your allotted energy runs short when your radiologist says she wants to talk to you. Your oncologist is there too. You slowly inch from disgruntled to frightened.

It would be beneficial, they say. It would speed the process, they say. You don't know why this is what sets you off, but before you know it you're gritting your teeth and locking your jaw and you don't speak but you can remember very few times in your life when you've ever been this angry. You want to tell them what you've been through on your own; how you've suffered with the worst bouts of dizziness and hearing loss and vomiting and crying and managed to get by it all with nothing but coffee and down time and Eames. For the first time in ages, you've been feeling like you're okay, and could be for a long time.

"We're thinking it would be best if we could just keep you for a little while?" she says, and says it like a question, which just makes everything worse because you know it's not.

You don't tell Eames until both of you are home that night.

"I thought you were..." he says, and trails off. You throw your arms up in defeat, pulling off your gloves and slapping them onto the counter with a renewed ferocity.

"I know!" you bark. "I know, I thought so too, but of course it's now that--" You run out of words and patience and shuck your jacket onto the ground in an angry silence before collapsing onto the couch.

"Thought you were improving," Eames finishes finally. He might be about to cry, but you can never quite tell with him. He sits next to you quietly and you let your weight sink into his shoulder.

There's some deluded portion of you that had put off ever thinking about this until it was already upon you, as though it couldn't creep up on you if you let yourself remain unprepared.

"I don't want to go to the fucking hospital," you say, realizing you sound like a moody teenager.

Eames lets his head fall against yours. He is definitely crying.

"It'll help," he promises. "It'll help."


	9. nine

Before you first go in, you insist to Eames that he shouldn't make too much of a fuss over it -- still, you're less than surprised when he shows up on the first day of your hospitalization with coffee, a fat stack of magazines, Dom, a former chemist of yours that you haven't seen in at least a year but remember being good friends with, and a packet of chocolate biscotti that turns out like metal against your newly-bewildered taste buds. Only a few hours into your stay, your oncologist had told you he wanted to switch you back onto IVs, but a different sort and with a different dosage; you suspect the medication has something to do with the fact that everything you smell or taste now seems half-copper.

Dom stays for about thirty minutes. The chemist, who you are friends with again in about a fraction of a second, stays for around two hours. You don't know how long Eames stays because you keep falling asleep, but you estimate it's been quite a while because every time you wake up he's still there.

\- - - -

Within a week, your estimated sentence of hospitalization is carved down from a sweeping however-long-it-takes into a sleek before-and-after: your oncologist recommends a splenectomy. You eagerly anticipate it, feeling like a prisoner getting out on good behavior. If it makes you better, all the better. If it doesn't, at least you might still get to go home.

\- - - -

Other than Eames, who hardly ever leaves the hospital in the first place, Dom is your only frequent visitor. He usually comes to see you every other day, sometimes even a few days in a row. He'll talk to you about any shows he knows you've seen from your hospital room and occasionally ask after your condition and about your current medication. After this he will usually sit in silence and watch whatever is on the chunky black overhead monitor. Sometimes he'll flip through the channels but it seems more like action for the sake of action than in the pursuit of a goal.

He comes off as so obligated that you begin to grow tired of his presence. Eames can sense this and will sometimes try to spark up conversation, but after his routine fifteen-or-so minutes of discussion, Dom seems firmly set into only small talk, even this wrenched out of him as though it is such a chore to think of anything to say to someone that he willingly decides to come spend his time with.

You think of being at his house the time when you first told him. You think of what it would be like if he didn't know. What it would be like if you, for all he knew, were fine, and so he wouldn't feel it was his duty to come clog up your bedside for a few hours each week. You think of a job you did with him so long ago that its place in your memory feels smeared around the edges: you'd had to construct a dream last-minute when your architect had gotten arrested the night before the job, and you'd gotten the landscape so glaringly wrong that only seconds into the extraction, the mark figured you both out and the dream collapsed almost instantly. Dom had torn into you with a ferocity that shook you up for days afterward -- called you a fuck-up and said if you wanted to make a single cent in a business like his, (he'd called it his, and it had made you want to hit him so hard) let alone stay alive, you would have to get your shit together and actually start putting in effort. You think of this now as you watch him stare at ESPN with his eyes unfocused. You can't decide if you want to scream at him or if you want him to scream at you.

"You don't have to see me, you know."

It is a Monday. You and Dom are watching an old, taped Cubs game that you'd missed because it had aired on one of those days when you could barely hear or bring yourself to do much but sleep. You tell him he doesn't have to see you and he gives you a look that, for a fraction of a second, you'd almost recognized.

It quenches rapidly, as it always tends to do now.

Dom shakes his head, slow and mild. "I know," he says, clicking up the volume a few times. "I want to."

"You want to," you repeat.

Dom is silent.

"You want to?" you repeat again with as much dryness as the three syllables will lend themselves to.

You'd be okay if Dom were afraid to meet your gaze or if he glared you down or if he gave you any sort of answer, definitive or otherwise. He just lets his eyes flit from the tv screen to your face and back again until turning to face you fully. His gaze seems void of both hesitation and conviction. He nods.

"Okay," you force out. "I don't--Jesus. You can leave."

"Arthur," he says, but the offense or the warning or whatever should accompany your name is untraceable. It sounds like a vague imitation of feeling, performed from a weakened memory.

"What? You can. I really--I can assure you, Dom, really. I don't care. You can leave."

He doesn't respond. You are uncomfortably incensed.

"You. Can. Leave." you drawl out in a voice that's lowered and gravelly with resentment and fatigue.

When Dom looks back at you, it is with a flicker of something in his eye, the familiarity of which actually excites you. Fueled, you jerk your head in a motion towards the door; "C'mon."

"Hey, listen--" Dom barks out firmly, and stands. You are preparing yourself for some huge catharsis and instead you watch the tension evaporate out of him until he looks almost lost, standing in the middle of a hospital room with his coat clenched in one fist.

"...nevermind, um." He says, quieting rapidly; "I... I don't... know... I'm sorry."

"Sorry? You haven't done anything besides just sit here in fucking catatonia for hours. You can't be sorry for anything when you haven't done anything."

You're standing before you know why.

"You have no obligation to me, okay? And if all you're gonna do is walk around on eggshells and do whatever bullshit you've been doing for the past two weeks, then I don't need you. And you should've left a long time ago."

"Arthur, Jesus, I said I'm sorry..."

"Would you stop it?" You find yourself advancing on him almost instinctively. "You wouldn't have done this before and I know it. If I'd said anything like this to you a year ago you wouldn't have put up with me for a second. Don't fucking baby me, okay? Don't do it and don't pretend you're not doing it. You stop it or you leave."

"Listen, I just--"

"You stop it. Or you leave."

"Excuse me..." You turn to see an older woman, a nurse, sharp-looking, standing half-in-half-out of the doorway. "Is there a problem here?"

Dom looks at you briefly; you can see him staring straight into your eyes and yet he still seems as though he's focused on something on the other side of you. He is blank. He puts on his coat and goes. He is silent.


	10. ten

They inject you with a lot of things before they put you under, a bunch of vaccinations for diseases they're afraid that taking out three-fourths of your spleen could leave you with. Each shot is administered by a clean-cut youngish nurse, probably close to you in age, who tells you his name is Liam and asks how you're doing but doesn't otherwise speak any language but medical terms and stark professionalism.

When they put you under, all you can think of are the comparative shortcomings of general anesthesia.

You spend a long time in something that feels like a dream, but the kind you haven't had in years. You have no totem. You have no control. There is color and pattern and sometimes sound. You don't know where you are but you don't feel lost. You wonder if this is what limbo is like.

Later, you see her. She is waiting in the doorframe in a plain blue sundress with no shoes and no expression. You don't want her to see you like this. You try to tell her so but she won't stop staring and every time you look into her eyes your jaw locks up.

She walks to you slowly and sits on the edge of your bed. You either don't move or can't move. You can't discern which. She leans close to you and holds you and her hair feels like wire as it falls against your face. You lay like this for what must be hours, still, your heartbeat a dragging undulation beneath the membrane of your chest, with Mal sprawled on top of you, laughing and singing _La Marseillaise_ into your ear.

You've been out for over three hours, Eames informs you when you wake up. You can hardly see and your comprehension is dramatically lacking but when you start feeling sloppily along your bedside table, he understands and opens the table's drawer for you. Your totem is inside and when you try to roll it, it keeps dropping off the edge of the nightstand and skittering off where you can't read how it fell.

"I'm trying," you keep mumbling to yourself. Your speech is slurred with the aftereffects of your anesthesia. You don't know what you say after this but you know words are spilling out of your mouth. Eames tries to calm you down but you insist that you have to ask her something.

"Nobody's here," he tells you, smoothing a quieting hand over your shoulder as you fall back against your pillow. "It's just us, nobody else but your nurse came in here. Do you need to ask your nurse something?"

You stare at him for a long time before rolling over and going back to sleep. You can hear the dull thrum of voices; your stay in the hospital has trained you against them, but for fleeting moments you can hear Eames speaking and so you don't tune them out entirely. You can only discern pieces, here and there, of what sounds like a single side of a conversation; "three hours" and "recovery" and "I don't know" and "cognitive faculties". He is quiet for a long time and you take this as a sign that he's hung up the telephone. "What?" he says as you start to drift off again. "What?" and "that can't" and "how did" and "oh my God" and "what can I".

"Sorry" is the last one. You're just barely awake and you hear him say he's sorry and then it's quiet again.


	11. eleven

When you wake up for a second time it is either sunset or sunrise, you can't discern which. Eames is in a chair by your bedside, as usual, but this time he's without a book or magazine or phone: he stares through the slats of the Venetian blinds until you move to touch his arm.

He asks after your condition and whether you need anything and when you assure him you're fine on all accounts, he nods and seems to go blank again for a moment.

"Hey," you urge him gently, and he glances up again. You've seen him wear that look before, but only rarely. An expensive breakfast in Wakefield. A deli near Chicago.

"Did something happen with Dom?" he asks. "Before your surgery?"

The memory strikes you, bitterly and totally. You'd nearly forgotten.  
You tell him about what happened, and that you still don't know why you'd chosen that moment to feel so victimized and vindicated, and that Cobb had hardly said two words to you the whole time, and that you still don't know quite what had happened at all. Eames looks at you for a moment and then says something comforting about how everyone has a breaking point.

"Doesn't mean I was in the right," you start to say as, for what feels like the thousandth time, someone in scrubs comes in asking after Arthur Callahan.

\- - - -

The bad news is they want to keep you longer. The good news is a different approach.

He tells you he thinks you'd be a good candidate. He also tells you it's relatively experimental.

"Ideally, we'd be going allogeneic, so you'd need to find a donor," he prefaces, "and after that you'd have to undergo a lot of therapies before we could start to do anything. And even then I can't guarantee any results."

Eames looks at you. You place your hand over his without breaking your oncologist's gaze.

"All right," you say.

\- - - -

The hospital finds you an anonymous donor the day after you agree to the transplant. Eames, who had volunteered immediately but hadn't matched your HLA type, eases you through the first few stages of what you can sense will be a painful trek of therapies: an awful regiment of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and immunosuppressants. Your radiologist commiserates with you after administering your first of many heavier dosages to come; warns you of the high likelihood that you'll be, as she says, "pretty out of it" until after the surgery.

When you and Eames are alone in your room for a sparse and precious two hours, you repeat this information, finishing with a desperate "so, if there's anything you need to tell me while I can still comprehend it..."

His expression suggests the unpleasant but necessary. He lets out a small, preparatory breath and tells you a story that ends with the ledge of a hotel window.


	12. twelve

You get up at seven. You start your first treatment at nine. You've finished all three by eleven. You don't remember falling asleep, but the next thing you remember is waking up at eight-fifteen at night to throw up, falling asleep again, waking up twenty minutes later to throw up again, falling asleep for however many more minutes before restarting the cycle.

You dream of Mal almost constantly.

Once, as you get up for water, you see what looks like her reflection in your mirror. Later, when you're coming back to bed from your adjacent bathroom, you see what looks like a half-familiar jacket on the chair near your bedside; heavy and masculine, not yours or Eames's. When you wake up five minutes later, it's gone and Eames has taken its place. You go back to bed and dream of falling.

\- - - -

"You're lucky," one of your attending nurses tells you on the day of your transplant. "The donor, I mean," she clarifies in a hurry. "Lucky you found a good match."

You laugh. In the wake of your catharsis, which had just happened to come in the form of shouting Dom out of your hospital room, you have made a firm decision that faulting everyone for any lightly-minced words only complicates things.

"Yeah," you say as you take what you anticipate will be your last ever dosage of immunosuppressants.

The marrow transplant takes nearly an hour, but it's painless and done through an IV so it's nothing you haven't already tackled a thousand times over. Your oncologist says they'll have to mold your hospitalization to monitor engraftment post-transplant, but once you're determinately engrafted, he says, assuming there are no side effects, they'll let you go home. It gives you something to look forward to.

You ask after your anonymous donor near the end of your transplant. Your attending nurse says she'll check with whoever it is that organizes that sort of thing; the following day, as she's taking your blood sample for your new pain-in-the-ass daily cell count, she says your donor left the hospital the day of the transplant, a few hours after they'd harvested from him.

"Wow. Resilient man," you remark.

She smiles. "Guess so. Apparently he's coming back here soon, though."

You think of someone, then try not to.

"You're allowed to give out that kind of information?" you ask because some part of you is always a professional first.

"Well, you're the reason he's coming back here. He said he wanted to see you. Specifically asked that you'd be warned, though... to make sure that you'd want to meet with him."

"Yeah, absolutely," you tell her, and when you have a visitor the next day you are only a little surprised to see the same jacket from your bedside on a burdened, squint-laden frame.


	13. thirteen

For all the things you feel sorry for, you only use the word once.

He waves it off.

The pair of you watch SportsCenter in silence; a different brand.


	14. fourteen

Your doses of radiation and chemo are reduced dramatically once your oncologist says your blood results suggest you're starting to engraft. You're not on immunosuppressants anymore. You haven't thrown up in days and your excess sleep is hardly excess anymore, only by a few hours here and there.

"Dom seemed... broken up. Understandably." you relay to Eames over your first non-hospital breakfast since before the transplant. He doesn't respond for a while, just butters a piece of toast and then informs you Dom has left the country, potentially for good.

You can hardly fathom a reply to that, so you finish your coffee and then tell him the same thing your oncologist told you.

"So what does that mean?" he asks. "I mean, what does it mean for your condition?"

You shrug. "Means if everything goes well I'll get to go back home."

Eames smiles; he hasn't done that in a while, you realize now. You place your hands over his forearms.

"Is it wrong that I'm happy?" he says in a genuine search.

\- - - -

"Well," she says, holding the paper results of yesterday's blood sample, "that's three days in a row with an excellent ANC and platelet count. Congratulations. You've engrafted."

There is a full minute where you honestly can't believe it.

She's beaming; says your oncologist will be in to talk to you in an hour or so and then after that -- well, after that you'll have options, which seems like a groundbreaking first. After that you'll get to talk to someone about leaving, and then, should you feel so inclined, you'll get to do it. You could leave today if you wanted to, and _Christ_ do you want to.

Your oncologist gives you the preparatory speech about how they're going to lower your dosages again but you're still going to need to come in for treatment, and about how you have to monitor yourself and make sure there are no outlying symptoms or side effects, and about the likelihood that you could relapse, potentially even to the point they might take you in again. You hold it in the regard that a schoolboy might have for summer homework on the final day before break. You've been in the hospital for around six weeks; you're beyond stir-crazy.

It doesn't strike you until you and Eames are going over the check-out forms together that maybe this could be your last serious stint in illness. You've never allowed your hopes to venture that far out before, and even now it's only a passing thought that twitches somewhere in your brain between signatures.

The moment you walk out the hospital doors, you almost don't know what to do with yourself. Eames looks at you for a moment; gives you a weary smile; asks you if there's anywhere you'd like to go.

"Uh. Just home, I guess." you say. He starts out towards the car but before he gets anywhere you stop him with a sudden, forceful embrace that overtakes you out of nowhere.

"Thanks," is the first thing that comes out of your mouth.


	15. fifteen

"Come with me," he says, in earnest, but only calls you a stick in the mud when you don't.

You know he needs to go because until now he's never been cooped up anywhere for this long. He knows you need to work because until now you've never been out of commission for any other reason but personal preference. You stay, and he goes, and neither of you get quite what you want.

You wind up with a lot of lonely nights. You wind up with astronomical phone bills from so many long-distance calls from Kenya.

You and Dom work together often; he doesn't know what to do with himself outside of dreams anymore and since going into remission you've refused to let yourself take work for granted. You're an unconventional team, but a highly effective one. It's only a matter of time before he scares up something monumental, to the point where it's supposed to be impossible, but then everything Dom's ever done has been at least a little bit impossible.

As it happens, he needs a good forger, and he knows you need a specific one.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the i_k meme on livejournal for the prompt " _Arthur's hair is so short because it just grew back. I really want to see Arthur post-chemo, all tired and sleepy, and sweet, protective Eames._ "
> 
> huge, gigantic, enormous thanks to all of you for the really flattering responses i've gotten on this one. (:


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